We finished rendering another Blender animation short, just in time for submitance to this year’s Suzanne Awards. The Butterfly Effect was part of our RenderStreet for Artists Program, that provided independent artists with free rendering, on our servers.
Creator of the movie, Patrice Bertrand explains the coming of the story, as well as the technical lessons he learned from this exercise.
RenderStreet: What’s the story behind the movie’s idea?
Patrice Bertrand: I must confess that the movie didn’t start with a written scenario. It started out with an empty metro station, orange seats and tiled walls, then playing around with animating a creature, then some metro footage. At some point, maybe around March, I thought “enough fooling around, let’s try to make something out of it, put it all together into short movie with a consistent storyline”.
It’s a dreamlike scenario, starting with real persons in a real metro, maybe someone dozing and going into a dream where a gecko is running in the carriage, then the doors open and it’s fully a dream world, and you can imagine that the final scene is the awakening, the return to reality. I can’t say why a gecko, why blue butterflies (“morphs”), other than I like their colourful shades on the black floor and saturated orange seats. The river flowing may be reminiscent of the “Styx, a river in Greek mythology that formed the boundary between Earth and the Underworld”, which is appropriate for the underground setting, and would carry the dead creature to another world. But the Styx also had magical properties, which would help explain how the butterfly and gecko end up merged into a single creature.
RenderStreet: What was the main problem you faced when working on the movie?
Patrice: The movie took about one year to complete, and I kept learning and improving the way I could achieve things. I had to make decisions all the time: whether to trash what I had done before, and start a new scene, which I did a number of times, but I had to stop doing this at some point.
One thing that took me a while to learn is to delay the quality renders and work with low resolution, low samples, low subdiv for as long as possible. As a beginner, you tend to want to see your scenes at the best quality from the beginning, and you fine-tune the details all the time. This slows down your work incredibly, and drives up render costs as well.
RenderStreet: The movie includes both filmed footage and animation. How did you organize your project internally?
Patrice: The project is organized with a main file /metro/station-xxx.blend, that is linking both the gecko from /gecko/gecko-vy-xx.blend, and the butterfly from /papillon/papillon-xx.blend, each of the three main folders having its own ./textures folder. The opening and end scenes, that use real footage and tracking, are into separate blend files, because there is no need dragging the movie clips into the main file.
I ended up using a lot of Blender scenes within the main station blend file. It took me a while to be confident that creating a new scene within my blender file would not result in duplication and the file getting huge. Scenes is one of those things that doesn’t have enough tutorials, I think. Ultimately, I realized that almost every time you add a new camera you should add a new scene for this camera. Otherwise your new camera does not have its own start and end frame, as well as other settings, and you cannot keep track of what should be rendered with this camera exactly.
The Butterfly Effect is among the Suzanne Awards short entries, at the Blender Conference 2014. The movie is under Creative Commons, you can find the blend files and resources available on GitHub.
Scenes taken from The Butterfly Effect short animation, by Patrice Bertrand
